Wolfgang P. Muller

This is a dense history of the shifts in understanding of abortion and how it came to be treated as a crime in western Europe between roughly the twelfth and early sixteenth centuries. Wolfgang Müller argues that the growth and centralisation of power in the hands of authorities, coupled with the development of law as a field of scholarly study (including the concept of “a crime”) at Bologna and other universities, were some of the major driving factors in this development. Over the course of the later Middle Ages, prosecution of pregnancy terminations shifted from being largely of those who assaulted pregnant women causing miscarriages to being of women who intentionally aborted a pregnancy or committed infanticide. Müller makes impressive use of the archives to build his case here, creating a monograph which is painstaking and encyclopaedic, but one where the density of the prose can verge on the opacity. He clearly assumes a reader who is already well versed in medieval legal history (particularly of canon law), and this is not a book I would recommend for the interested lay reader.… (meer)